Page 68 - JOURNAL OF LIBRARY SCIENCE IN CHINA 2018 Vol. 42

YAN Hui & LIU Jiqun / ICT acceptance behavior of rural digital poverty communities: 067
Field reports from China’s six provinces and municipalities

3 Research findings

Considering our purpose is to directly analyze relation between rural digitally poor communities and
ICT, and to discover the origins of digital poverty and solutions of alleviation, we import perspectives
of technology acceptance and continuous usage. It is aimed to catch sight of staged laws embedded
in technology acceptance behaviors, and break through the limitations of traditional research on their
deficiency of technology access and primary usage. The theory would be built on technology access,
and enrich the theoretical system of digital poverty. Starting from digital inequality theory, technology
acceptance behavior theory, and digitally poor characteristics of the field interviewees, we construct
three categories of concepts. The first group is demographic variables, like age, career, and education
background. The second group is the perception of ICT, such as perceived usefulness, perceived
ease of use, self-efficacy and so on. Self-efficacy refers to residents’ perception of ICT learning
ability and using ability. The third group is the external social surroundings of technology usage,
which means social capital and social relation offered to those agents in situation of digital skills
poverty. In process of data analysis and theoretical model building, we import the three categories of
core concepts into the ICT accepting process of rural digitally poor communities to offer theoretical
framework to explain the transferring and periodic relations of different accepting stages.

3.1 ICT acceptance behaviors analysis

Access to ICT devices, the primary stage of rural residents’ ICT acceptance behavior, is
fundamental basis for daily information practice of rural digitally poor communities and their
digital poverty alleviation process. Acceptance behavior of ICT in this research means how rural
residents accept the basic devices, for instance, cell phones, personal computers and the Internet.
On account of related textual evidences from in-depth interviews, we observe how the inherent
characteristics of agents, such as age, career and education, and external surroundings of ICT
usage, correlate with their ICT acceptance behaviors, and analyze the impacts of perceptions of
ICT on the relations.
About the inherent characteristics of the interviewees, age, career and education influence ICT
acceptance behaviors of rural residents in different ways. Young rural residents tends to accept ICT
devices, for example, to buy intelligent cell phone (GZ3), and buy the second personal computer
at home (AH43). By contrast, older rural residents are more likely to reject the purchasing of ICT
devices and learning behaviors (GZ1, CQ3). Careers without any farming activities like village
heads, self-employed bosses and students are inclined to getting access to ICT devices (HN1,
AH43, CQ2), while those farming residents usually have low intentions to ICT access (GS27,
TJ4,TJ1). Reasons include traditional economic factors such as high computer prices and network
connection cost (HN4), and career habits, for instance, searching information for market prices